An embodiment relates generally to vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications relate to co-operative vehicular communication systems that are based on two-way communications for interacting in real time. Such systems have typically been directed at traffic management, collision warning, and collision avoidance systems. Such systems can extend a host vehicle's range of awareness of environmental conditions by providing relevant information regarding the status of traffic in addition to any safety related events occurring in proximity to those neighboring vehicles of the host vehicle.
With the evolution of the V2V communications, transfer of non-safety related data may be a desirable feature. For example, vehicles can obtain information related to places or services other vehicles have visited. Other examples include peer-to-peer music sharing among vehicles, diagnostic and prognostic information comparison among vehicles, or other non-safety infotainment information which is valuable to customers. A remote vehicle desiring to utilize stored information of another vehicle can possibly request such information from the other vehicle. In V2V communications systems, an issue with wirelessly communicating stored information relates to the size of data packet that is transmitted, in addition to determining what information is relevant to the requesting vehicle. Transferring large quantities of information may result in overburdening the bandwidth of the wireless communication channel. Information transferred may also be duplicate information that the requesting vehicle already has stored in its memory. Moreover, the time that two vehicles are in communication with one another may be of a short duration at best, and if large amounts of data are transferred, then the non-overlapping portion of the data may either not be transferred or may not be transferred in its entirety.